


Depression

by SiriuslySherlocked



Category: Original Work
Genre: About Me, Autobiography, Depression, F/F, Idk ive been through some shit so, Mental Health Awareness, Mental Health Issues, Suicidal Thoughts, if anyone cares, my life story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 03:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18563104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SiriuslySherlocked/pseuds/SiriuslySherlocked
Summary: A little about me. Actually, a lot about me. I know this website is primarily for fan fiction, but I've been hitting some low points recently and I wrote this last night and decided I needed to post it somewhere.





	Depression

Depression sucks.

You know, some people say it isn’t real. They say that about a lot of mental illnesses, like anxiety. Anxiety is probably harder to diagnose because obviously everyone gets anxious sometimes. Everyone gets depressed sometimes too, but clinical depression goes much deeper than that, so there are more obvious symptoms.

But it’s definitely real. I mean, I should know. Thousands of other people should know. Depression afflicts so much more of the population nowadays than ever before. I don’t know the exact statistics, but I know it’s become much more common than it used to be. People finally realized, over centuries and centuries, that life actually sucks. Sorry, that was the depression talking.

So, a lot of things can cause depression. An event, like in my case, or sometimes it’s just in your genetics, which probably sucks even more. But anyway, my case was a fun one. Not an unheard of one, not new or unique, but definitely lots of fun.

I’ve been through a shit load of stuff. I mean, I’ve been through almost all of it. Divorced parents, the which-parent-is-the-bad-guy game, the lies, the fights, the yelling, step parents and step siblings, and that’s just the divorce. That started a while ago, when I was half the age I am now. Funnily enough, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as it bothers other kids. I have no idea why, other than that I was an independent as opposed to a clingy kid, but divorce isn’t the point.

I’ve also been through something pretty uncommon, as I understand it. I was homeschooled for my entire life up until high school. I had no idea how public school worked. And the thing with homeschooling is that first of all, all the kids think you’re stupid because of it, or if you really are stupid they think it’s because you were homeschooled. Secondly, you aren’t on the same curriculum as public school kids are, which is why kids think you’re behind on things, but the truth is that yes, some things you are behind on, but some things you’re ahead on, too. So obviously, it’s extremely difficult to get accustomed to public school after you’ve been away from it your entire life. But that isn’t even the good part.

The school I went to, the first public school I had ever attended, was not just any old school. It was a charter school, and you had to get in via a lottery. This school was called GSMST, or the Gwinnet School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. Sounds nerdy, right? That’s because it was. It was much more difficult than any old public school, and had a much bigger work load. So woohoo, the first public school I ever went to was also a very difficult one, where I was expected to already know things that I didn’t know because I wasn’t on the same track as the other kids.

I did horrible the first year. Some kids were upset if they had a 95 as their lowest grade (oh my god I want to punch them), but I was just delighted that I passed everything. Chemistry was my problem class. Well, nearly all of them were a problem, but chemistry was always my lowest grade. I just barely passed the class with a 70 at the end of first semester, but I managed to get it up to a C by the end of freshman year. Once I got affiliated with public school I did better. Definitely not the all star student with all A’s, far from it, but I was doing okay for what my backstory was. Sophomore year, I did even better. Still not all A’s or anything, but I probably kept around a B average, and I did very well on the standardized tests the county made us take. It was sophomore year the depression started, though.

Rewind a bit to where this whole thing started. Here’s the real meat of the problem. When I was twelve years old, I didn’t really know that homosexuality was a thing. I was raised Catholic, and I guess I just never thought about it or was taught anything about it. Being homeschooled, I didn’t get out of the house much either, so I was also behind on social issues and basically the entire rest of the world. I pretty much lived under a rock.

Anyway, my best friend was the one to introduce me to this odd concept. She showed me two female characters on a television show we watched, and I thought it was extremely weird, but not entirely bad. It took me a while to get used to it, but eventually they became kind of cute, and then I began to “ship” them along with my best friend. After that, she showed me these two boys in a boy band that she liked together, and that was even weirder. This time it was boys, and they were real people this time, too. But eventually I got used to it, and I began to ship them too, almost to the point of obsession. A little while later, my best friend told me that she believed she was interested in girls. She was scared to tell me because I was Catholic and she was atheist, but she had been my best friend since we were two, and while I knew my religion didn’t support it, I still loved her and wouldn’t have stopped being her friend no matter what it cost me.

But after _that,_ I sort of developed a crush on my best friend. I'll call her Karen, which I should mention, because she’s very important to this story. Now this was even weirder. This time it was _me_ that liked another girl. It was so strange to me, completely new and alarming, and it terrified me. It kept me up at night, quite literally. I remember I had three dreams on three different nights, each of which I was dating one of my friends, including Karen. The first person I told was my friend Jessie. After that, I told my step-sister, Mary. After that I told my therapist at the time, Carrie, although I didn’t like her very much. Then, I told my mom.

I didn’t _want_ to tell people. But it felt like I had to, like I had to get it out, because it was eating me up inside. I couldn’t sleep. So I got up one night, told her, and broke down into tears. She didn’t say anything about it, because I was very clearly upset, but she told me things like I can’t have sex and blah blah blah. After that, we didn’t talk about it much.

Fast forward a few years to when I was fifteen in my sophomore year at GSMST. By then I had become a bit more comfortable with my sexuality. I had gotten used to it, but I still wasn’t comfortable just talking about it with my friends at school or anything. I was still crushing on Karen. I cared about her more than anyone else in the world. Her happiness was all I wanted, especially if I could be the one to make her happy. I wouldn’t usually buy things for myself, but when it came to buying something for her that I thought she’d like, my money went in a heartbeat. She could always cheer me up with just her personality, but what I admired most about her was how hardworking she was. She had her own set of problems; her mom was sick with liver disease and her dad worked all day, so she had to be the one to care for her mom, cook, clean, everything, by the time she was only eleven years old. She had a brother, who was a year older than her, but he didn’t do nearly as much as she did. And Karen never even complained, either. Even if she did feel some resentfulness at her situation sometimes, she always felt guilty about it because her mom was sick. Her mom was on the edge of life and death, and Karen fell into her own stage of depression. I didn’t know about it until a while afterward, though. She was very good at hiding her feelings behind her happy-go-lucky disguise.

Anyway, my feelings for Karen were still going strong, and I had more friends at that point. At some point the school had a club fair where we could go around and learn about and sign up for clubs. The school had a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance), which I had seen at last year’s club fair, but I was much too scared to sign up. I was scared to sign up this time, too, but I was attending the fair with a friend this time and she said she was scared too. So, we decided to sign up together. Sure, it was only signing up for a club, but there were other people there, that I _knew_ , that could _see_ me signing up for this club, and it was frightening but exhilarating. I felt so free, like some chain that had been holding me back was finally loose. It still took me a little while to be comfortable with being open about my sexuality, but it was a good start. I also joined the debate club, and when my mom picked me up I told her I had joined the debate club. She was excited, because she had been in the debate club when she was in school. Now was the hard part. With a sigh, I told her I had joined GSA. She was much less happy about that.

From then on, she was a bit passive-aggressive about the club. I wanted to make cookies for the first meeting since it was a sort of small potluck, and my mom made some snarky remark about how I made cookies for a gay club but not for homeless people or whatever. She made numerous other comments too, but I don’t remember them.

The club wasn’t even what I cared about. Honestly, it was kind of boring. But the thrill of coming out, the feeling of being free from chains I hadn’t even known existed until they were broken, that was what I wanted. It wasn’t like I wanted to go around holding a gay flag and shouting “HEY EVERYBODY I’M GAY” at the top of my lungs. I just wanted to be able to be open about this part of me like I was about any other part of me.

I guess my mom thought I was being showy about it. It also probably didn’t help that we had hardly talked about this since I was twelve, when I had first come out to her. She had probably figured that it had gone away, and here it was popping back up again all of a sudden. We got into a lot of fights about it, me screaming that she didn’t support me and she thought it wasn’t real and that it could be “fixed”, and her screaming whatever her argument was, I don’t remember much. All I know is that was what started the whole depression shebang. Woohoo, happy new year.

The constant fighting with my mom, the tear between my sexuality and my religion, what was acceptable and what wasn’t, it was too much. The stress and work load of school didn’t help either. I didn’t even have any sort of outlet, because all I had time for was school work. My hobby was theatre, but theatre is time-consuming and I definitely didn’t have time for that at GSMST. It got worse and worse, and I didn’t think it was all that bad, because I didn’t have the really common symptoms that doctors ask you, like loss of interest in activities and stuff, mostly because I didn’t have time for any activities. I don’t really remember having a loss or gain in appetite or sleep patterns either.

Except it was bad. Like suicidal bad. It was all too much, too much, too much. It was all I could think about sometimes. How much I wanted to die, to not have to feel any of this or deal with any of these problems anymore. Sometimes I couldn’t even move. I would be sitting on my floor doing homework or something, and I’d want to get up and go to my bed, but I just couldn’t. I procrastinated in school more. I tried to find a way to illustrate or write down all the problems I was facing, but I couldn’t. It was too much for me to even comprehend. The best I got was some sort of messy flowchart with more and more writing crammed in when I thought of more problems.

Depression is when everything is too much. Everything is too much and everything _hurts_ and you just want it all to _stop_ , you want _everything_ to stop, all you can think about is how much you’d rather be dead than sitting in this classroom, or in this bedroom, or in this argument. It’s a big hole that you can’t dig yourself out of. You have no hope at all. People tell you it gets better, but you can’t believe them. You just think about how life will just get even harder as you get older, how it _won’t_ get better, it never will, and everything would be so much easier if you were dead, or, even better, if you’d never been born at all.

Then you start thinking about death. The concept of it. What happens after you die. You get very curious about what sort of afterlife there is, or if there isn’t one, you try to comprehend what it’d be like to just _not exist_. What terrified me the most, though, was the idea that maybe the afterlife was terrible, maybe Hell was real and maybe I’d have to go there, and it’d be even worse than the life I already had, and I’d want to die even more, but I couldn’t because I was already dead. There was no escape, no way out, no end to the suffering, just endless torture forever and ever and ever.

The worst it ever got was when I planned how I would kill myself. I had decided on hanging myself. I wasn’t exactly sure of the details or anything, I just decided that was the way I wanted to do it. But it was like the idea of killing myself was too rash, too impulsive. It was like something was stopping me from doing it. I _wanted_ to, but I couldn’t, somehow. So since I didn’t seem to have the nerve to do it myself, I started praying to God that I would be killed by something else. My mom and I got into a minor car accident somewhere during this period. Our car got pretty damaged, but we were both okay, and the worst that happened was my mom had a slight concussion. I was perfectly fine, but afterward, I wished I had died in that car accident.

It did get better. I dropped out of GSMST and began going to my home public school, which was a crappy school that was way too easy for me even with honors classes, but because it was easier I was much less stressed and I was able to do theatre again. I got on antidepressants and those helped a lot. But the problem with depression is that once you think about killing yourself, you can’t go back.

Every time I had a particularly strong low point in my life, a tiny part of my mind would resort back to suicide. Not nearly enough to do it or really even consider it, but it was always there. Sometimes it even becomes your go-to. If you’re suffering, end it.

Just recently, I had been doing fine. Life was cool. Normal. I was attending online school now, so I could work at my own level without being off track from other public schools (not to mention I didn’t have to deal with the idiot teenagers that went to my school). But my opinions on homosexuality and their rights had grown much stronger now that I had learned more about it, and the struggling conflict between religion and sexuality was still something I struggled with. It caused a lot of pent up anger in me, because I was angry that God had made me this way and then went and made it against the rules. We can be this way but we can’t act on it. Well that fucking sucks. Congratulations, you’re straight, you get to go find someone and live happily ever after. But you, nope. Sorry not sorry. Get over it. My mom and were arguing about this more than usual, because she accused me of indoctrinating my younger brother with my own beliefs about the Church’s teachings on sexuality. And yes, I admit to doing that. I didn’t want him to grow up to be a homophobe or something. And besides, it was a part of me that he should know about. I’m also very strongly rooted in my opinions, and unfortunately feel the need to voice them when an opposing opinion is something I whole-heartedly disagree on.

I continued to argue with my mother about various beliefs I had, and she claimed that I had been ruined by public schooling and the rest of the world, and I insisted that my opinions were all my own, which was evident by the fact that my opinions ended up being a mixture of the teachings I was raised with and what the majority of the outside world believed. She got mad and took my phone away because the Internet was apparently to blame for all my “liberal” opinions. And while she had my phone, she found some questionable conversations I had had with my friends.

I was texting in speech that most teenagers use with their friends, and I was talking about things teenagers talk about with their friends. I don’t think she should have been all that surprised, but she was, and she got really mad. She couldn’t even look at me without a disgusted look on her face. She kept making completely unnecessary insults aimed at me. I honestly felt like she hated me, like she would never forgive me for this, like this was the end of any positive relationship we had had. We were in the car on the way back from church one Sunday, and we had to stop by my dad’s house to drop off a check. On the way there, my mom kept dropping insults for no reason, and I had had enough. I told her that if she kept talking, I would jump out of the car. She told me I could do so when we got to dad’s.

All day and all the night before I was thinking of how much I wanted to be dead. And this time, I did want to do it myself. If no one else would, I would. My step-dad is a sheriff, which means he has a gun somewhere. When he came home from work wearing his belt thing with all the pockets for guns and other tools, I just stared longingly at that gun, trying to figure out how I could get it. At church the next day, I was trying to decide whether I should shoot myself in the heart or the head, because I wanted to make absolute sure that I would die on impact. In that car ride, I was thinking of opening the door and letting myself fall out of the car and get run over, but I decided there were too many variables and I couldn’t be sure that I would die on impact. At some point I was trying to decide when to do it, since I had two plans. Either I would wait until I was home alone and find the gun and kill myself right on their bedroom floor, with a note that’d say

You wanted this.

I wanted this.

Win-win. 😊

Or, in a much more brutal way, I would find the gun and keep it until both my mom and step-dad were in their bedroom, and I’d walk in, holding the gun behind my back. I’d say, “I have an apology for you, to make up for everything I did.” They’d say okay, and before they could do anything I’d pull the gun out and shoot myself right in front of their eyes, letting my brains spill out everywhere. I wanted to _hurt_ her, I wanted to make her see what she’d done to me, how she’d made me feel, I wanted her to know that it was _her_ fault, and I wanted her to have to live with that guilt forever. It was the darkest thought I’d ever had before.

We arrived at my dad’s house and my mom said, “Well? Are you getting out or not?” and I stayed silent for a few moments, before I said, “Yeah, okay,” and walked out.

I stayed with my dad for a week to let both me and my mom gather our thoughts a bit, and that comes up to right now. I just came back from dad’s house today. Hopefully I’ll be okay. I was scared, I still am, that my mom will still be uncivil toward me. She said she loved me. But I never get that feeling. She seemed to be more upset that I “used her Internet” to do or learn about things she didn’t want me to do or learn than the fact that I wanted to shoot myself. She said she wouldn’t be “manipulated” by my threats to commit suicide, as if it was all about her.

But I’ll be okay.

Eventually, I’ll be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> All names have been changed for the protection of privacy.


End file.
